Abstract
Scientific and technical education can have dual uses, with both peaceful and WMD applications. Examples include Iraqi engineering students in the 1970’s learning skills that would later be useful in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons programs, and A. Q. Khan, who went from European degrees in metallurgy to stealing URENCO centrifuge technology and leading Pakistan’s program. Engineering and scientific education in proliferation-related fields should be controlled as are tangible dual use materials and technologies, and denied to citizens of countries likely to be proliferation risks.
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Notes
- 1.
Obeidi and Pitzer (2004, epigraph pp. 228–229). This book also contains information relevant to the 2003 Iraq war: “the long term intention was to wait out the inspection process and try to build a bomb later, when the world was no longer watching” (Ibid. p. 152). Iraq had no WMD in 2003, as was learned after the war, but it intended to build them. The war was premature, but not unnecessary.
References
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Obeidi, Mahdi, and Kurt Pitzer. 2004. The bomb in my garden: The secrets of Saddam’s nuclear mastermind. Hoboken: Wiley.
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Katz, J.I. (2020). Education and Training as a Disruptive Dual Use Technology. In: Martellini, M., Trapp, R. (eds) 21st Century Prometheus. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28285-1_10
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